I have never been more grateful for a sat nav's patience than I was driving to Kirchheim in Hesse. There I was, humming along what I thought was a perfectly reasonable country lane, when the voice calmly announced I had arrived at my destination. I had not. I had arrived at a field of very unimpressed cows. The actual cottage was another ten minutes round the back of beyond, down a lane so narrow I briefly considered folding the wing mirrors in. By the time I found the proper turning, I had named three of the cows and was seriously considering asking them for directions.

The cottage itself appeared like something from a half-remembered childhood story. A proper Hessian Fachwerk place, all timber beams and slightly wonky angles, with a garden that looked as though someone had spent decades nudging it towards perfection and then wisely decided to stop bothering. I dumped my bags in the hallway with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who had just completed an expedition rather than a three-hour drive from Frankfurt, and immediately made for the garden chair that looked most likely to collapse under my weight. It held. I took this as a sign that the week would go well.

The first afternoon set the tone entirely. I had brought three books, which now seems almost aggressively ambitious. I read perhaps six pages of the first one, stretched out on a blanket in the garden with a cup of tea going cold beside me. The light through the apple trees did that dappled thing that makes you feel obliged to describe it, even though everyone already knows. A blackbird landed on the fence post, looked at me with what I can only describe as professional scepticism, and flew off again. I felt thoroughly judged and entirely content.

There is something particular about the quiet in a place like this. Not silence exactly, because the countryside here is busy with its own business. Wood pigeons carrying on like drunks at closing time. The distant clank of someone doing something agricultural and mysterious. A dog barking three gardens over with the persistence of a creature who has never once been ignored and sees no reason to start now. But underneath it all, a kind of settledness. The opposite of the hum I had not even realised I was carrying until it stopped.

I had plans, of course. I always have plans. There was a walking route marked on a map, a castle somewhere within reasonable distance, a bakery in the next village that supposedly did exceptional Streuselkuchen. I did none of it. The morning I intended to walk, I made coffee and simply forgot to leave. The afternoon I meant to drive to the bakery, I found a packet of biscuits in the cupboard and called it fate. The castle remains a mystery to me, though I did wave in what I believed to be its general direction from the garden, which felt sufficient.

What I did instead was gloriously, deliberately, almost aggressively little. I moved between the garden chair and a kitchen chair that caught the afternoon sun. I finished one book and started another and abandoned that one too when the plot required more engagement than I was prepared to give. I watched the neighbour hang out washing with the methodical patience of someone who has never once considered hurrying a task in their life. I tried to emulate this and failed immediately, then tried again with slightly more success.

By the third day, I had stopped checking my phone for anything except the time, and even then with decreasing accuracy. Someone asked me later what I had done in Kirchheim and I found myself describing the quality of the light on the sitting room wall in the late afternoon, the particular creak of the garden gate, the way the coffee tasted stronger for being drunk slowly. These are not activities. They are barely even observations. And yet they filled the days completely, like water finding its level.

I left with the books largely unread, the walking boots unworn, and a profound suspicion that I had accidentally discovered something important about how I ought to spend time. The sat nav got me home without incident, though I did glance at the field of cows as I passed, half hoping for some acknowledgement of our shared history. Nothing. Some things, I suppose, are best left as single encounters.